“Far more stylish”: The movie Stephen King said was better than his book
Barely a year seems to go by without a Stephen King adaptation arriving on screens, either big or small, with the legendary and prolific author’s back catalogue in a perpetual state of development, although he hasn’t always been thrilled by the end results.
He’s been known to celebrate Frank Darabont for handling The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile with such grace and poise, though, but on the other hand, he’s one of a very small number of people who think Stanley Kubrick dropped the ball when he transformed The Shining into one of the most spine-tingling psychological horror stories ever told in cinema.
King believed that Torrance was inherently a good guy who was “bent one way and then the other” by various cosmic forces of evil. Kubrick masterfully blurred these conventional definitions of morality by making Torrance a psychopath. He thought the horror of humanity was much more compelling. The two sides of Torrance are another symptom of the differences between the two artists. King is a streamlined, functional creator, while Kubrick, though meticulous, is a far more conceptual storyteller.
King’s favourite adaptations tend to be when they take his story and accelerate it, rather than expand it itno new places. A fervent creator bound to his own vision, it isn’t surprising that he would hold such a distinct idea on what is and isn’t a good adaptation of his work, even if it does vary from director to director.
That’s the issue with King’s bibliography in a nutshell; so many of his novels, novellas, and short stories have been adapted by so many filmmakers over such a number of years that the consistency has been all over the shop, and when he tried to do it himself with Maximum Overdrive, he’d be the first to admit that it couldn’t have gone much worse.
It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the very first of his writings to be translated into a major feature film continues to stand tall as one of the very best. Brian De Palma inadvertently got the ball rolling on what would swiftly snowball into a subgenre unto itself when he turned King’s Carrie into a classic coming-of-age horror that found huge critical and commercial success.
“Brian De Palma’s Carrie was terrific,” King offered in a frank assessment. “He handled the material deftly and artistically and got a fine performance out of Sissy Spacek.” The latter would be an understatement, considering she earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ in one of the most iconic turns in the history of Hollywood horror, but the praise didn’t end there.
As well as acknowledging how “the film is far more stylish than my book,” which he calls “a gripping read” that’s nonetheless “impeded by a certain heaviness,” King went a step further and flat-out called De Palma’s Carrie superior to his own.
Branding it as “a really good horror/suspense film” to Movieline, King deemed it “much better than the book.” Suffice it to say, when the uninspired and formulaic remake was remade as a television film in 2002, and again as a movie in 2013, neither version received much public recognition from the person who first put pen to paper and concocted the story in the first place.
The bar was set very high for King adaptations from the very beginning, and while many of them in the half-century since have fallen woefully short, Carrie continues to dwell not only among the top tier in terms of quality, impact, and legacy but in the author’s mind as one of the finest adaptations of his work the business has ever mounted.
